Posted on 05/01/2008 9:52:10 PM PDT by The_Republican
Rapidly increasing world food prices have already led to political upheaval in poor countries. The crisis threatens to tear apart fragile states and become a humanitarian calamity unless countries get their agricultural systems moving.
Now, with conference committee negotiations over the final shape of the Farm Bill at a critical stage, Congress needs to change the foreign food-aid program and help avert this calamity. The Bush administration has urged, rightly, that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) be allowed to buy food locally, particularly in Africa, instead of only American-grown food.
The U.S. government currently buys grain and other foodstuffs from American farmers for free distribution in poor countries where a disaster has occurred, or sells it in food-deficit nations to generate funds for food-security development programs. Under the law, the food must be shipped almost exclusively on American vessels.
Ocean shipping costs are 20%-30% of the food-aid budget; and it takes on average over four months to order, buy, ship, offload and transport food by ground. In a famine, people can die waiting for the food to arrive.
Other problems arise. One food shipment sunk in a storm off the coast of Asia in 1996. In 2006, two food shipments were hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. Hurricane Katrina nearly shut down much of the foreign food-aid delivery system in the Mississippi Delta.
Purchasing food locally simplifies the process, cuts down the time delay in delivery, reduces the logistical risks, and saves transport costs. These savings can be used to buy more food. At the same time, higher prices will probably reduce the purchasing power of USAID's food-aid programs by at least $200 million this year. While President George W. Bush has released food aid from a reserve fund, it is not sufficient.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Hmm...my heart strings aren’t thrumming over the issue of starving third-worlders anymore.
Could it be because so many celebrated in the streets on 9/11/2001?
It wasn’t too long ago that many African nations were refusing free food from the USA because it wasn’t “GM -Free” because of pressure from Europe and their own African leaders. I wonder if they will still refuse this free food?
Actually, I’m still trying to figure out the downside to permitting Africa to suffer the consequences of their own actions or inactions....
How long must Africans be the responsibility of the “Great Satan” they despise after they have dispossessed the white farmers and industrialists of their hard gained livelihoods in Africa?
as always, the peasants pay dearly and they pay twice.
Foreign aid has been constant. The food we just ordered four months ago will arrive shortly...
What needs to be done is teaching them HOW to cultivate crops...or move.
It makes even more sense to stop this unconstitutional activity of giving away our treasure.
Africa is starving because of its so-called leaders. All that happens when we send food or money to Africa is that the leaders who created the problems stay in power and gain wealth.
Other than Nigeria, which is awash in oil money to pay for higher-priced imports resulting from higher oil prices, there are very few sub-Saharan African countries which aren’t fertile enough to be self-sufficient in food IF the political risks of properly capitalising agriculture in those countries were mitigated.
Starvation in Africa is a political implement deliberately manufactured by the region’s political machines.
"because they find too few buyers "
"farmers were producing a bumper crop of corn and other cereals. Yet with no market for the locally produced grains, prices collapsed."
"What we are advocating is already in place. The World Food Program, the food-aid agency of the United Nations, has been buying food in African agricultural markets successfully for years using European aid funding..."
Minus the skimming.
” Foreign aid has been constant. The food we just ordered four months ago will arrive shortly...
What needs to be done is teaching them HOW to cultivate crops...or move.”
But they can’t move. Many are still use to being nomadic hunters and there is less and less space to roam. They will have to suffer some in their change to domestication. Also there are many cultivation programs going on over there that are making great strides. Volunteers go over there to teach “farmers” how to use some modern organic methods to grow enough food for the family and hopefully more.
There is also a non profit company that still relies heavily on donations from people and governments. But is making a huge impact in African farming. These two Europeans made an easily assembled water pump, that a farm worker uses like a stair master and one hose goes to the water source and the other hose is directed by another worker to distribute the water. That has greatly increase how much land a farmer can put more land under cultivation. Many now can grow not only enough for their family, but now have enough to sell as well. This company also does the manufacturing in Africa and hires Africans to work in the shop and sell the pumps to farmers. Beforehand a farmer and workers(family members) would have to carry the water by pails from a river/creek and walk it to the farm land.
So there are programs. But they may not be enough and this is in the countries that didn’t have much of white rule. The other countries is a whole other mess.
Well, they have to starve if we want to keep bribing Senators Grassley & Harkin and pumping $8B a year into Iowa!!! I mean, what’s more important?? Global famine or paying off ‘farmers’ who live in Manhattan, Connecticut, Chicago and whever the HG of ADM or ConAgra is?
But, thank God, the demoncrat party in the House held hearings at which they receive ‘expert’ testimony that the higher food prices is probably just because of the higher oil prices and not really because we are literally setting fire to 40% of the corn grown in the US to produce an ‘alternative fuel’ which we don’t need since there is more oil in the world than we could burn if we started a contest to do so.
Here's one that teaches our American heritage internationally :
http://www.tillersinternational.org/skills/intnlDev.html
NEW TAGLINE
Must be something wrong with those figures the UN keeps tossing out.
Current African welfare roll: about 700 million. You'd think there would be a few that knew how to grow something among them...
Africa is like a giant welfare recipient of the U.S. government.
And in some years, we throw half of it away because we can't sell it.
I see no reason at all why commodity prices shouldn't reflect the actual cost of growing crops, rather than they be kept artificially low because of huge farm subsidies, but apparently you do. I'd like subsidies, which cost us hundreds of billons a year, to be done away with completely, and let the market reflect the actual cost of growing it. Why have commodity prices gone up? because fuel is double, and fertilizer triple the cost over last year. But boo hoo, turd worlders can't afford it now. The solution? raise subsidies and push down commodity prices artificialy. Who pays for it? The taxpayer. Frankly, I'd rather pay 25 cents more for bread, not that $8/ bushel of wheat drives it up that much.
In the 1960's wheat was $14 a bushel, yet bread cereals etc. cost mere pennies a loaf. What does this tell you? It tells you there are other factors which effect food costs besides commodity prices.
I just shake my head when people believe the first bit of drivel that comes from media explaining why food costs are going up.
Why would anyone believe what the very same people that are trying to sell you global warming say?
You eat pig feed?
Sure ethanol has it's negatives, but so does gasoline. The ethanol ones are easily overcome by engne design. Gasoline ones aren't. A full blown ethanol run engine is way more fun to drive than a detuned, sucked out gasoline engine which still can't run as clean as an ethanol engine giving you 500 hp of neck snapping pleasure.
You support taking feed out from a piglet’s mouth, shame!
That’s ONE way to make a case- contrasting a 1972 LeMans with a NHRA dragster!
That's the beauty of Ethanol production, it doesn't even do that. Only the starches are processed out of the corn and used for ethanol production, the rest of it is still used for animal feeds, dog food etc. Plus, the nutrients from the yeast are used as well, adding to the nutritional value of corn based feeds.
People have to be taught just how ethanol is made, what KIND of corn is used for it.
Looking at file footage of a farmer dumping feed corn at an elevator somewhere while some script reader (the modern day journalist) on TV reads some BS from a telepromter telling you there's a human food shortage because of ethanol production doesn't reflect anything near the truth.
As I said, why would anyone believe anything coming from the mouths of the same people who are pushing global warming fears on the world? It's nothing but pure BS. Bio fuels can and WILL be a good thing for this country and could solve a lot of other long standing problems like the elimination of huge farm subsidies.
Commodity prices reflecting the real costs of farming is a GOOD thing, Seeing farm machinery companies re-hiring workers to make new machinery would be a GOOD thing, as well as all the other economic activity profitable farming brings to communities.
A lot of money and jobs, GOOD jobs will stay in the USA, not sent overseas to fill terrorist pockets.
The era of Bio fuels and sciences has just begun, making ethanol is just the tip of the iceberg. there's bio diesel, and also bio-oil (which can make regular gasoline)that can solve a lot of our waste problems as well.
What we have to do is stop politicians and envirowienies, UN Marxists from slowing down that progress and vital key towards the return of the USA to energy independence, leadership of new technology and an exporter of energy and fuels
...and then there’s Washington pork.
(You do speak alot of truth)
http://www.biomassmagazine.com/
""If we get this done, it's kind of a big deal. It's a global warming achievement," ZeroPoint Chief Executive Officer John P. Gaus said. "We're probably more experienced with different types of biomass than literally anybody else on the planet right now."
"Once the technology is perfected, the Potsdam plant would be capable of powering every car in town — those that run on diesel, anyway — with carbon-neutral fuel."
“Rapidly increasing world food prices have already led to political upheaval in poor countries.”
Not true. They are starving because of their corrupt governments, many of whom threw out white farmers and took the lands only to not know how to farm. There isn’t a nation in Africa I would even consider living.
“Actually, I’m still trying to figure out the downside to permitting Africa to suffer the consequences of their own actions or inactions....”
There are three words that best describe Africa’s food problems. Corruption, corruption, and corruption...
I agree with the thrust of your post but you overstate it a bit. Diversion of corn for ethanol is a contributing factor to higher global commodities prices because of substitutability among grains.
That said, ethanol is clearly NOT the dominant factor. Higher demand, higher fuel and fertilizer costs, and back to back bad wheat harvests in a couple of places are the main factors. U.S. corn exports are actually at a record high, despite the ethanol buildup.
Of all the arguments being made against ethanol, food vs. fuel is probably the weakest. The poorest people in the world are subsistence farmers in third world countries. Higher commodities prices are a good thing for them, even if (wealthier and politically more organized) urban consumers have to pay a bit more. This is an opportunity to seriously address world poverty at the grassroots level in the poorest nations, provided governments are willing to nurture agriculture. Africa should be feeding itself.
U.S. energy policy doesn't need to be subordinated to the desire of trough-feeding NGO's to dump subsidized, low cost American grain on Africa. Bad government, corruption, misguided aid policies, and the suffocating swarm of NGO's have set back African development ever since independence. But rather than deal with that, it's easier to set up a war dance about ethanol.
Africa has never starved for lack of nature’s ability to grow food.
I'm not asking them to do anything...
But I would suggest that a rock against the head of an armed thug -- puts a gun in one's hands.
A gun in one's hand, makes them an armed citizen --- not a subject of a dictator...
If those MILLIONS of abused "peasants" are unwilling to fight or WORK for their own lives -- why should anyone else do it for them.
Africa now has EXACTLY what the world's Leftists demanded - Home Rule.
"Home Rule" ain't all it's cracked up to be when the "homies" are a bunch of black racist fools, crooks and worse.
Thank you.
Not to sound like the global warming nazis by immediately presuming that you are personally involved with in the production, refining or selling of corn-based ethanol, but you argument doesn’t make any economic sense unless you’ve gotten it from Sen Grassleys office or one of the ADM experts.
There are two reasons that commodity prices have gone up: 1. There is a bottleneck for corn futures because of the Congressionally mandated 8 billions barrels of ethanol in 2008 which is close to twice what they mandated for 2007; and 2) Commodities have become the new home to speculators who want to make money fast without having to work for it or wait for investments to mature. These speculators were previously in NASDAQ in the 90s and then real estate in the 2000s and since both those sectors busted they have moved into the next sector of the economic where there is a market which is tight enough to manipulate. And that sector is oil first, then corn (as a results of Congress) and then wheat, rice, soy and then all chemicals used for farm production.
The price of oil has not cratered the US economy. It did not cause food inflation when it doubled from $40 to $80. Actually, it had no effect at all because food producers just ate the added cost of transportation. But then the envirowackos pressured the new democrat controlled Congress into an ‘energy bill’ in 2007 which made ethanol the ‘solution’ to foreign oil. Their paymasters and backers at ADM (who had been slowly pushing corn ethanol onto consumers for the last decade plus) were thrilled and promised that corn was the miracle fuel which could create 3% of our entire fuel needs within 2-3 years.
And now we have ethanol being produced in a volume which nobody wanted. And it could only be produced because slightly more than half of the price is actually a subsidy from the US Taxpayers. (And now, even that subsidy isn’t enough because of corn prices to ethanol refineries. Funny, huh?)
Congress held their press conferences along with the envirowackos heralding this new ‘end to petroleum based economy’ which is the goal of the Left. And we started sprouting up refineries like weeds by the dozen in the midwest. And we started using 40% of all corn production for these refineries. It really doesn’t matter than the corn used for these refineries is not the food-grade output because the feed-grade corn is just as needed since it powers the entire protein industry (cows, chicken, pork).
When a huge new pressure was put on the corn farming sector, the demand for corn went up. Substantially. And other potential buyers of corn either had to pay more per bushel or the refiners would get the corn. It was the equivalent of adding another corn-eating country the size of China out of the blue. And when the pressure on corn prices goes up, more farmers want to plant corn. And the other crops get replaced and then there is a shortage of those crops and the price of them goes up.
Oh yeah, and I know about the currently expected reduction in acreage of corn at the moment based on self-reported farm planting schedules. But that is about a year too late to matter much and it just creates another opportunity to drive up corn futures (which did happen).
The traders at the Chicago Merc and NYMEX are driving up the prices. There is no question about that. But they are using the tightened corn market to leverage this into huge gains in future prices. And once corn disrupted the production of other grains, the commodity traders went long on those and created the same effect.
When you have a market with no excess capacity (like oil right now), its possible for any player in the mix to disrupt the futures prices by doing anything provocative like introducing a newly mandated buyer for 40% of all US corn or an announcement that x-number of acres in Kansas was going to be weather effected and would miss the corn planting deadlines for the year. (it doesn’t even have to be true, it just has to get the news to the traders).
Global Warming is a scam. And Global Warming was the excuse for Ethanol (at least corn-based ethanol which is less efficient than a similar amount of crude). Having Congress decide on what the ‘solution’ is to providing alternatives to crude-based auto fuel is a problem since Congress only knows what special interest groups tell them. And since corn was already there and could be turned into ethanol (although not efficiently by any stretch) the lobby for corn get the envirowacko endorsement to be the ‘solution’ and Congress mandated you and I to have to pay for it.
It may be uncomfortable for people to be pointing the finger at the newly burgeoning corn-based ethanol as the source of the disrupting in commodity prices but there is no other rational explanation. This idea that oil price increases could cause a tripling of grain prices is funny to an economist and just annoying to people to are paying the literal costs of the subsidies to the millionaire-farmer lobby (not ACTUAL farmers, the guys like Wayne Andreas and David Letterman).
Fuel prices went up the last 33% AFTER corn prices started to jump. Fertilizer prices started to rise AFTER corn prices jumped.
You are looking at this from the perspective of the corn growing side. I’m looking at this from the Wall Street side. Wall Street is looking at ALL sides to figure out who is going to win any struggle and THEY determine the prices for corn, wheat, oil or anything else traded. And THEY believe that the ethanol industry mandated by Congress is the reason that corn prices have spiked. And they believe that the spike in corn prices is the reason that wheat, rice, soy and fertilizer ingredients have now spiked (so they can either keep up with or make up from the increase in corn production).
You can disagree with the market. You can decide not to like the market. But the market has decided WHY prices are where they are. And it has decided prices are as high as they are because of ethanol.
Bush could fix this with an end to the mandates on ethanol. But he could also end the price spikes by increasing the minimum margin requirements for trading accounts at the MERCs and drive the speculators out of the market and pop this bubble. This IS a bubble. Corn is not worth the current price is any real sense, nor is oil or rice. But without the pressure being taken off the supply to the market it will be at risk of manipulation by those who can most easily profit from it.
Think ENRON. They did it on natural gas and electricity and made billions within hours from simple tinkering with a very tight electricity grid in California. They took the spot price of electricity from $400 m/w to $1900 m/w within 40 minutes. THAT is a nasty situation and makes our current oil and grain prices seem tame by comparison. But the causes are exactly the same - a tighten market for a commodity which the producers can now disrupt for their financial benefit. And the corn producers welcomed ethanol as the means of creating an over-demand for their commodity and giving them the ability to drive it to the sky.
I’m sorry if this sucks. But it’s true whether its likable or pleasant or not. I’m certainly pissed the hell off about this as a consumer since I have to eat all these costs. And unless you are directly making a representative profit from corn, you are losing on balance since you have to pay higher gas, meat, chicken, egg, bread and Coke prices. Ask the president of Tyson Chicken.
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